Laundrification

If you are like me and forget things, this might be useful. When I used to do laundry, I’d put the cloths in the washing machine, but then I would go do something else and I’d forget about it and then missed the step of putting the cloths in the dryer.

So, I was thinking how to prevent that. Obviously, I could buy an expensive smart washing machine that would be connected to my WiFi, talk to some cloud service and whatnot.

Or, I could do something myself about it. And that’s how laundrification came about. It is not my idea, I found a similar approach on the internets, but the solution were not what I wanted, so I did my own version. The idea is simple: use photo resistor to measure light coming from the LED that indicates the cycle finished. When the light comes on, send a notification to my phone.

One needs a WiFi enabled circuit like Arduino MKR1000 and use IFTTT webhooks service (formely maker channel) to trigger the notification. Sending a http request with Arduino is trivial, and the platform is simple to work with. That’s why I chose it. I played with other smaller and cheaper boards, but I only managed to fry them. However, the idea should still work, if you do not want to use Arduino which is more expensive. You can also use a different webhook platform. I used IFTTT because I already had an account there.

The project lives on github.